Raspberry Pi VC4 Driver Working To Reduce Overhead, Android Native Fence Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi VC4 Driver Working To Reduce Overhead, Android Native Fence Support

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has shared another weekly update concerning his summer 2017 hacking on the VC4 open-source driver stack that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VC4-Overhead-Native-Fence

[dungeon]

RPi Fondation released installable Raspbian x86 image couple days ago:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-r...ramming-tools/

So maybe some comparison again RPi3 under same Desktop is sustainable... maybe against GMA 3150 crap or something like that

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag..._quantal&num=1

[sheepdestroyer]

Unless RPi Fondation changes their mind and decides to support armv8 optimisations / 64bits kernels, this platform is dead to me. I am so disapointed by their current stance.

I bought a RPI3 for Retropie and emulation and that's one place that could really use any perf improv.

[chithanh]

What for do you need RPi Foundation support?
You can install Gentoo, openSUSE and some other distros fine compiled for 64-bit ARM. Even better would probably be aarch64-ilp32, but that seems not very widespread still.

[-MacNuke-]

Why do so many people like the RPi3 for emulation? I tried it once on my device but it is soooo slow for it. I mean... you can only use a 7 year old version of snes9x, very old mame releases and near to no games from the 32bit/64bit generation. You pay near to $100 for a complete set and even than it lacks a screen and speakers. And it's far from portable.

[e_tank]

does anyone know if the official 7" touchscreen panel currently works with the vc4 mesa driver at all? and if so what does and doesn't work atm. Eric's blog post is not very clear on this and i couldn't find any recent info via a few google searches

[sheepdestroyer]

chithanh : Retropie is based on upstream raspbian ; maybe dumb but cut a lot a maintenance for them.
Also, seems fair that's upstream's job to provide optimised software for their HW...

-MacNuke- : RPi3 is cheap and low power ; I built a full sized arcade cabinet for my brother so could have put a real tower inside but the maintenance/cost/weight would not have been the same

[skierpage]

It's great to see the code sharing:

I sent out a rework to make some VC4 NIR lowering code shareable with other drivers.
... We’re much closer to matching the common DRM helpers now, with just our async pageflip code still being special.

I bet $1000 Broadcom's proprietary driver is crappier code with worse test coverage and less common code, therefore far harder to maintain. At what point do chip vendors get a clue and seek the benefits of open source development?!